Happy birthday, Mr. Cell Phone

April marks the 30th anniversary of the cell phone’s invention. I spoke with Marty Cooper, the man credited with inventing it when he worked at Motorola.

In those intervening years, the cell phone has gone from Cooper’s first 30-ounce device to one that weighs as little as three ounces.

I asked Cooper, now the head of ArrayComm, a wireless mobile company that offers an alternative to cellular at 1Mbps broadband speed, for his take on the cellular industry.

“The vision from 30 years is still not complete,” Cooper says. “Instead of attacking the problems of cost and reliability, they [the cellular industry] focus on gimmicks and gadgets such as cameras and MP3 players, none of which work better than the discrete devices.”

Cooper says the technology to improve quality of service exists now: “Someday, a carrier is going to realize that QoS is more important, and the public will pay more for it.”

Hear, hear.

You do need a weatherman to tell which way…

When the PR agency for AccuWeather called to let me know that the company will be launching a service to provide subscribers with weather forecasts on their cell phones, I barely suppressed a yawn.

Then I thought, no, once and for all, I’m going to blast these guys. Why in the world do we need yet another way of finding out what we already know?

However, as I’ve come to understand, there is some kind of universal balance scale at work in our lives. So that when you are absolutely, positively sure of something, you usually discover you are absolutely positively wrong.

Such is the case with the weather. It turns out there’s a lot of money tied up in getting accurate forecasts. And, if you are a gambler, you could even risk some of your own money on future weather conditions.

Jim Candor, a senior vice president of AccuWeather in State College, Penn., gave me some excellent examples.

In 1994, two freezes occurred within two weeks of each other in the coffee-growing region of Brazil. AccuWeather subscribers include those who buy commodities in the futures market, and when those subscribers received word of the forecast for the hills of Brazil, they quickly started buying up contracts. When the frosty weather descended, the price of coffee jumped from $1.40 per pound to $2.60, giving those investors with faith in weather people a $50,000 profit on each contract. Candor said they made millions.

Other subscribers include auto-collision specialists and roofing companies who want a jump-start when a hailstorm is predicted — sort of like ambulance-chasing, Candor said.

The Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers Association needs a vertical temperature profile of the atmosphere to know whether or not they can burn their sugarcane without causing a deadly inversion.

Weather affects about $3.7 trillion of the economy, and so I offer this paean to the weather in hopes that my readers will rethink weather and their business.